The Clubhouse

There's a climbing frame in the yard, with a little playhouse on top - which the boys call The Clubhouse.  But the climbing frame is old and decayed, and the boys don't go in the house.  I think they don't go in because the house feels wobbly and unsafe - although they say this isn't the reason.  I've tried all sorts of things to make them go in - I put some chairs there, I bought some carpet, I've hidden snacks and cans of soda (diet and caffeine free, natch) but they still don't go in.  So we thought we'd take the clubhouse off the climbing frame and put it on the ground.  The easiest way to do that was to saw through the legs on one side and push it over.

Bees

I was in the yard this morning (picking up dog poop, if you're interested) when I heard a noise that sounded like a weird car engine in the street. I went to look at what it was, and it was this tree which had zillions of bees on it.

I tried to take some close up photos of them and learned about how the laws of physics make that really hard.  And why people buy focus rails.

Hollywood Sign / Save the Peak

The internet is covered with pictures of the Hollywood sign, which has been temporarily covered with letters saying "Save the Peak". < Full story, which I can't be bothered to repeat.. So I took one as well.

Then I wondered why I wanted to take a picture, when there were lots of better ones around. But hey, this one's mine, so it's somehow better.  In my opinion.

Here's what it looked like before, from the same place:

Snow Day

The boys wait with somewhat inappropriate footwear

An awful lot of America and the UK seems to be covered in snow at the moment, but Southern California (unsurprisingly) isn't.  Today the boys were off school, so we decided to go and find some snow.  Finding snow near Los Angeles is not much of a challenge - you just need to go and find a mountain.  And then get up it, which is more of a challenge.  So we decided to go to the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. The cool thing about the PSAT is actually not so cool - it's pretty warm, 'cos it's in Palm Springs, in the middle of the desert, so it's pretty warm, the forecast today was 22 degrees (C).

Like I said, it's very, very high

Then you get on the tramway (of which more in a minute) and that takes you up the mountain into a snowy bit, where it's cold.  You play in the snow, say "Blimey, my toes are froze", get back on the tramway and ride down to where it's warm.  The problem (as I discovered) is what are you supposed to wear?  The first time went there was Summer (well, it was October, but Palm Springs is a desert) and we were passing by, saw a sign and went there.  But we were wearing shorts and t-shirts, so by the time we got to the top, we were too cold and came back down.

Those cables look very thin.

This time we were cleverer. So when we arrived, got out of the car with our jackets and our snow hats and our snow boots and our gloves and scarves and sled.   (We'd put them on at home and were immediately too hot in the car, and so we took them off again).  We were standing around in our arctic kit holding a sled, while other people stood around in shorts.  Then we got too hot before we'd even got to the ticket desk and had to take them all off again.

I think that's Dan

But eventually we got to the car.  It's called a tram, but trams (at least where I come from) usually approximate horizontalness.  This doesn't. It climbs up the side of a mountain that feels a bit like 89 degrees from horizontal, but probably wasn't (someone just told me it only averages 30 degrees, but peaks at 45 degrees. Which shows just how poor our depth perception is at that sort of thing).  Whatever it is, it feels very, very steep. I'm pretty good with heights (I worked briefly putting roofs on water treatment plants), and I don't like it much.  The woman next to me looked like she was going to puke.  I tried making a witticism about how it would be better if we waited until night time, but she just stared ahead and still looked like she was going to puke.  The boys made a video and told me not to tell them to hold on.  The whole cable car rotates as it rises, so you can't avoid seeing just how far down it really is, which it does by rotating the floor.

I always prioritize photography before rescue.

Dan set off

And kept going

and kept going

(Statistics bit that I've gleaned from the leaflet) The cable car rises about 1.5 miles in 11 minutes - which is high enough to make it pretty cold, and there was an impressive amount of snow at the top, and there are only 5 support towers, which vary in height from 200 feet to 50 feet.  But even if you survived the cable snapping and your cable car hitting the ground, it would then tumble about a mile down the mountain anyway.  These are things I try not to think about. I'm always surprised it's not more famous, because it is quite an impressive structure, and the logistical problems make me feel weak; the top is completely inaccessible except by cable car, unless you spend a couple of days climbing, so all the materials had to be brought there by helicopter, until they had built the cable cars, and then they could use them to bring stuff.  But the cable cars have a 60 ton counterweight to keep the cable taught - how did that get there?  Everything comes now by cable car, including things like water to flush the toilets (I thought they'd have waterless urinals, but they don't.)

That's a shot from the window on the way down. The black blob at the bottom is the car park.

The problem with the top was, bizarrely, that it was too warm.  The temperature was quite a bit over freezing - I'd guess it was 5-10 degrees, and so the snow wasn't very frozen.  This was good in many ways, because it made good snowballs and wasn't icy and hard when you fell off the sled.  But it meant that it melted really easily and made everything wet very quickly - you couldn't sit down without getting a wet butt, and our snow boots weren't designed with waterproofness in mind.  I spent most of the time in a t-shirt, because I usually had to pull the sled up the hill, then run down to fetch it when one of the boys let go of it too soon, then pull it back up again, then run down to rescue / console whichever boy had just fallen off it and hurt themselves, then pull it back up again.


Alex catches some air

Anyway, the day progressed with only minor injuries, and then we came back home again.

Oh, here's some videos too:

Dan having trouble pressing the buttons when he's recording me:


Dan falling off:



Alex (almost) learns the importance of being aware of one's environment.

Flickr Photo Stats

One of the cool things about Flickr is you can see where people came from when they looked at your pictures - and if they came from a search engine, you can see what they searched for.  Today someone searched for "lightning hitting a building" on Yahoo.  Bizarrely, if you do that, Dan's picture of lightning hitting a building (shown on the right) is the considered by Yahoo to be the 6th best picture (at least today).
Possibly even more bizarrely, when they saw the small image, they clicked on it, to see if it was actually the picture they were looking for.
Some else searched (on Google) this time for Gravity well discovery science center.  As far as I can tell, this is the only picture of the gravity well at the discovery science center on the entire interwebz.  So I  was pleased to give them what they wanted.






 

The picture people find the most is this one.


If you search on Google or Yahoo for very young twins you'll find this picture - it's first on Google even if you search for web pages, and third for Yahoo on web pages, but bizarrely doesn't come near the top for image search on yahoo.